Column

Some addictions are worth the pain

I admit it. I’m an addict. I’ve been hooked since school.

It was different back then. A lot of us were using. We felt part of something. When we got high in those days, we all got high together. But now the sharks have moved in. It’s big money and dog-eat-dog.

I don’t like the new scene much, and I’ve tried cold turkey. I’ve not turned on some weekends, I even locked my gear away once, but I crack every time. I’ve just got to get a result. Did they win?

It’s hard being a Nottingham Forest fan. I often wish I wasn’t. But there is virtue in my compulsion. Not all addictions are bad.

Being a football fan means elation, despair and everything in between. It means subjecting yourself to moods beyond your control, and to sharing their swings with others who’ve made the same choice. Most of us know that much of it is daft. But there’s constancy, loyalty and a sense of cause that goes beyond the trivialities of booting leather.

The businessmen are doing their best to cure me. Forest are now a plc, run by management school rules. A plc has shareholders and customers — it is blind to any other category. Old-school supporters feel alienated — but not yet enough to let go.

It’s the same in the NHS. The business ethos that perceives society as a loose bundle of self-interested customers is purging an honourable craving. Health care business-style is a series of transactions. If you can pay you get heard, you get therapy — you may even get cared for. If you can’t pay you either get nothing or you are seen and forgotten. No one expects a shoe shop to supply a second pair to a customer who can afford only one, however much she needs it. So no one should expect a hospital to give a person a second operation if her insurance has run out. Doctors must think in business mode — or go bust. And if that means breaking off a therapeutic relationship because the patient (or the patient’s funder) can’t pay any more, then so be it.

But this isn’t what it should be about. There is more to the social world than trade, as true fans know. We bonded to our teams because we were allowed to feel a part of them — their success was our success. People who grew up with the NHS became wedded to it because we were able to commit to its ideals. We knew what drove the farmers, the clothes shops and the grocers, and we knew that bigger ideas stood behind a service that would protect each one of us should we need it. We might spend money at the grocers, but we gave a much deeper support to our public service. Most NHS workers shared the allegiance (just as Forest players used to identify more with their club than their agents). When the NHS was making progress, everyone was making progress.

But we are losing it. Customers can’t belong, they are transient purchasers. Brand loyalty comes from advertising benefits to the individual consumer — and it is fickle. It is not a moral addiction. A customer’s only devotion is to himself.

There are many things wrong with subjugating the social world to an amoral market — but by far the worst is that it abrogates the possibility of obligation to others. Today’s wide-boy culture is eliminating the privilege of duty, which can exist only in the presence of ideals greater than the self. Those in power who are opposed to the domination of commercial culture must try to restore a social climate conducive to commitment. To do so they might begin to advocate addiction for once — addiction to something other than oneself.